Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
This isn’t a breakup pep talk. It’s a full-body recalibration for women navigating life after divorce. Dear Divorce Diary is a podcast for women dealing with grief, loneliness, anxiety, anxious or avoidant attachment, and identity loss after divorce — especially when quick fixes, positivity, and spiritual fluff no longer work.
I’m Dawn Wiggins, therapist, coach, and homeopath, and this show goes where most divorce advice won’t: into your nervous system, your unspoken grief, your buried rage, and the parts of you that shut down just to survive.
Through honest conversation, somatic tools, EMDR- and IFS-informed work, and nervous-system support, each episode helps you feel instead of perform healing — and rebuild safety, confidence, and self-trust from the inside out.
You’ll hear raw solo episodes, real voice notes from women in the trenches, and intimate conversations with experts who don’t just talk about healing — they embody it.
If you’re tired of being told to “move on” while your body is still bracing, this podcast is your place to land. Your nervous system already knows the truth — it just needs a space that can hold it.
Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce
304. Day 10: Why You’re So Hard on Yourself After Divorce (Especially on New Year’s Eve)
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Dear Divorce Diary: Dedicated to Healing
Exclusive access to premium content!New Year’s Eve has a way of turning self-criticism up to full volume after divorce.
The comparisons.
The sense that you should be further along.
The quiet question of what’s wrong with me that this still hurts?
If you find yourself being unusually hard on yourself today, this episode isn’t here to tell you to “think positive” or try harder.
It’s here to explain why this happens—and what your nervous system is actually doing when self-doubt takes over.
In this episode, we talk about:
- Why divorce retrains your nervous system to scan for failure instead of progress
- Why pride and self-validation feel uncomfortable or even unsafe for so many women
- How New Year’s Eve amplifies comparison, loneliness, and internal pressure
- A simple practice to help your system start noticing what is working
This is not about forcing confidence or pretending you’re okay.
It’s about understanding why self-criticism shows up when safety feels fragile—and how to interrupt the spiral without shaming yourself for being in it.
🎄 This is Day 10 of the 12 Days of Divorce Christmas—short, steady episodes designed to support your nervous system during one of the hardest weeks of the year.
Join Dear Divorce Diary Premium to access the full 12 Days of Divorce Christmas.
Capacity builds in connection. Hugs ❤️
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Instagram: (@dawnwiggins)
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On the Web: https://www.mycoachdawn.com
A podcast exploring the journey of life after divorce, delving into topics like divorce grief, loneliness, anxiety, manifesting, the impact of different attachment styles and codependency, setting healthy boundaries, energy healing with homeopathy, managing the nervous system during divorce depression, understanding the stages of divorce grief, and using the Law of Attraction and EMDR therapy in the process of building your confidence, forgiveness and letting go.
Hi, love. Welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave, and build back your confidence. I'm your host, Don Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer, and divorcee. Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce. Hi, love. Welcome to day 10 of the 12 days of divorce Christmas. We are very excited about this one because this one is really, really about stepping into becoming her, right? This woman that you dream of embodying. And so today we are going to talk about being proud of yourself, letting yourself feel proud, even if no one else sees it. And we know you struggle with this because we can read your mind. Just kidding. Um, because we watch the women in our coaching program really struggle with this. And a couple of them really, really, really profoundly. And so most women are so insanely hard on themselves, it can be really, really, really debilitating. And so one of the choices, the very intentional choices we have to make is part of the being on our own treatment team, right? Being part of our own healing means being able to compliment and validate and congratulate and feel proud of ourselves. Now, this is something we have been really encouraging you to do lately when we've been saying, send us your wins. We have to program our brains, we have to give our reticular activating system the prime directive of looking for success in our lives, because that is not how we have primed our reticular activating system to this point. And our life is going to unfold according to our underlying beliefs, our subconscious programming, and the intentions that we are living day in and day out. And so you can say you want a thing, but if your behavior is not lining up so that the bulk of the time that you are spending in your waking life is aligned with that thing, it ain't coming. So one of the ways that you are going to set the stage on this very difficult day, I feel like today, our understanding is that today is we're we're recording this ahead of time, obviously, right? So our understanding is that today is New Year's Eve. Let's hope this lines up on that day. Today is New Year's Eve, and it's a day that we tend to be ultra hard on ourselves in a single space, right? We are comparing ourselves to other people, we are feeling down on ourselves. Like, why am I not enough? Why do I not have a person? Why do I have to go through this ball dropping, kissing at midnight, celebratory, like feeling and like excited about the new year to come. Like, why do I feel such shit on today of all days, right? And so today, especially is a day where we have to call in validation, pride, and a sense of I canness on today. So here's your mission should you choose to accept it, is to take out a stack of sticky notes, bonus points if they are festive colors and not just boring yellow. Throughout the day, as many as you can write down positive statements about yourself, things you are proud of, things you feel good about on the sticky notes and start putting them around your home. Now, we're not just stopping there. Your next mission, should you choose to accept it, and this is where it really gets good, is to text a handful of people in your life and ask them what they would write on a sticky note about you. What are they proud of you for? What are they seeing you doing doing that you maybe don't see inside of yourself? Your coworkers, your girlfriends, maybe your kiddos, maybe your family. I don't know. You know your family better than I. So, like, use discernment there, right? Maybe us, maybe we know you a little bit. If you've had communication with us, ask us what we would write on your sticky note. Shoot us a message, right? Reach out. This is why Joy was giggling in yesterday's episode, because she knows that we were gonna we were gonna ask you to ask other people what they are.
SPEAKER_00:I'd also love to hear how many sticky notes you got out. Like I want to know, did you get 10, 12, 23? Like count them up at the end of the day and send us how many um little wins or little Yeah, points of pride. Yeah, that you collected, right?
SPEAKER_01:And so the spreading them around your house is really, really important because our brain defaults to the programming that it has been operating from for the last however many decades of your life. And if we do not do immersive learning, right, if we do not create an immersive, transformative environment, we are not going to transform very quickly. And so when I was in a post-divorce phase, all through my business office, which was a very chic like East Boca, like fancy wood floors, fancy, you know, like very fancy. Uh, I had hand-colored affirmations hanging around the office in my living room, in my bathroom. Producer Joy has had them in her car, right? Like, bathroom mirror is a must-do. I always had a gratitude list hanging from my bathroom mirror, and I had taped a pencil or a pen to my mirror also, so that it was always handy handy handy there to be writing a gratitude list every day. I would just add to it. And it was in on lime green paper so that it could not evade my notice, right? Like there are these things in a healing process that have to be in your face, non-negotiable, or you are not gonna get the results that you are looking for. So, today's mission. When you want to go to poor me, why is this happening to me? Why does my life suck on December 31st of 2025? Challenge yourself to move to I am proud of myself for this, and I'm gonna ask other people to make similar expressions, and I'm going to paper my house with these positive points of turning the page. Turning the page on how I used to relate to myself, which is with self-doubt, and how I'm committed to relating to myself, which is with empowerment. If you want to take it a step deeper, I would love for you to sit down and journal about how it feels to do this in your body. What does your body say about doing this task? Notice the resistance that comes up, notice the discomfort that comes up, and journal through that. Breathe through that. That is how you really get the most bang for this buck. But basic, basic, basic, write out the ways in which you are proud for yourself and own it. We're proud of you. Be on the team with us. We love you so much. Peace.
